- Fleek, an AI startup working to digitise the secondhand fashion supply chain, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Burda Principal Investments, an early investor in Vinted.
- This round brings Fleek’s total funding to $45 million, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, H14, Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator.
- Fleek’s AI model, trained on millions of transactions, can grade and price secondhand clothing from just a smartphone photo. The platform connects over 2,000 suppliers with more than 50,000 buyers in more than 100 countries.
A piece of clothing donated in London might travel thousands of miles to a sorting warehouse in Karachi, Dubai, or Delhi, where it is graded, priced, and routed by hand. Up to 24 billion items go through this process each year.
Fleek, based in London, wants to use AI to replace manual sorting and has raised $25 million to accelerate the transition.
“Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it. It travels thousands of miles, gets sorted by hand in a warehouse in Karachi, and finds its way back to a vintage shop in London or New York, if it’s lucky. We started Fleek because that system is broken, the market it serves is exploding, and nobody is building the technology and infrastructure to fix it,” says Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO of Fleek.
Why an early Vinted investor is investing in infrastructure
Burda Principal Investments, an early Vinted investor since its 2015 Series C round, the marketplace has since reached an €8 billion valuation, as of April 2026, led Fleek’s Series B
New investors include eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, while Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator returned. The round brings Fleek’s total funding to $45 million, up from $20.4 million raised in 2024.
Investors are increasingly looking at the infrastructure behind resale marketplaces instead of the marketplaces themselves. Apps like Vinted, Depop, and Whatnot, valued at $11.5 billion as of October 2025, need a steady, accurately priced supply of secondhand goods, and that inventory is still checked by hand today, with inconsistent standards and little pricing transparency.
“We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche. We know what it takes to build a platform that scales in this market. From its growing supplier network to the technology behind it, Fleek is building the infrastructure the next generation of fashion will rely on,” says Julian von Eckartsberg, Burda’s managing director for Europe.
How Fleek’s grading model works
Fleek was founded in London in 2021 by Arora and Sanket Agarwal, inspired by the difficulty of finding reliable inventory during pandemic-era supply chain disruption.
The company, which also has offices in Pakistan and India, built a vision-language model called Fleek Sort, trained on years of secondhand transaction data, that identifies, grades, and prices clothing from a single photo or video. Graders in Pakistan, India, and Dubai already use it, with pilots underway in the UK, Europe, and the US.
“There’s more data locked inside the global secondhand supply chain than almost any other market, yet historically very little of it has been captured. We’ve built the world’s first AI trained specifically to understand secondhand inventory — what it is, what it’s worth, who wants it and where demand exists,” Agarwal says.
Once graded, the items list automatically on Fleek’s own marketplace, where AI handles pricing and buyer matching. Fleek says it has no direct competitor focused on wholesale secondhand grading, though it sits upstream of consumer-facing authentication platforms like Vestiaire Collective and GOAT.
A related supply-side startup is Finnish Bought, which raised $1.5 million in 2025 to unlock resale inventory sitting unlisted in consumers’ inboxes.
The unresolved number
Fleek connects more than 2,000 wholesale suppliers and graders with more than 50,000 buyers across more than 100 countries, and says it has kept more than 12 million garments in circulation. The secondhand apparel market is valued at over $200 billion today.
The infrastructure side of resale has largely been an afterthought next to the consumer apps built on top of it. Burda’s investment suggests investors now see sorting and grading, not the marketplace, as the more defensible thing to own.
The open question is whether Fleek can digitise a $200 billion offline industry fast enough to keep pace with the rate at which secondhand clothing continues to enter it.
